A war with three fronts

Violence continues to decline in Kashmir, but Islamists launch new military, ideological and political wars.

PRAVEEN SWAMI in Srinagar

LATE in June, the Lashkar-e-Taiba's top commander for northern Kashmir emerged from the forests above the small mountain hamlet of Sumlar and ordered its residents to gather in the local mosque.

"I don't want to see young girls and boys roaming around with mobile phones," said the imposing 6-foot 6-inch Pakistani national, who is known only by the multiple aliases `Bilal', `Salahuddin' and `Haider', "for it will lead to immorality and vice". Three terrified teenage girls who were found to be in possession of the offending instruments were dragged into the centre of the mosque and tonsured in full public view.

What happened in Sumlar seems a world away from Srinagar, a city in the midst of a tourism-driven economic boom, its landscape peppered with the kinds of icons of modernity Bilal was so incensed with. Yet, Srinagar has also been the centre of the most aggressive Islamist mobilisation in years, driven by claims that the uncovering of a prostitution racket which has led to the arrest of top politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen and police officials has revealed the true character of the Indian nation-state.

Similar actions are not hard to come by. June saw Srinagar host a highly successful festival of Sufi music from India and Pakistan while Lashkar terrorists attacked one of the revered mystics in the town of Sopore, just a three-hour drive from the State capital. And not weeks after the politicians focussed their energies on shaping a new constitutional future for the State, the Lashkar carried out horrific massacres of both Muslim and Hindu villagers across the State.

Even as the peace process proceeds apace, it would seem, Islamist forces have renewed their fighting on three fronts: military, religious-ideological and political.

Notwithstanding some ill-informed claims on the issue, levels of violence in the State this summer are actually somewhat lower than last year, in line with the trend since 2001.

However, two significant variations are evident. Grenade attacks have almost doubled in comparison with the figures for April-June 2005. Killings of police personnel too have increased, in stark contrast to declining fatalities of terrorists, civilians and all other security forces.

What sense might one make of these figures? Some insight is offered by an intelligence-led police operation targeting the Lashkar cell that carried out the May 21 suicide-squad attack on a Congress rally in Srinagar on the eve of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's round table conference on Jammu and Kashmir. Five people were killed in the attack, which targeted Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, and 21 people, including Inspector-General of Police K. Rajendra, were seriously injured.

Much of the cell's energies, though, were focussed on operations of lower intensity. Directed by Bilal's key lieutenant, Mudasir Gojri, a north Kashmir resident, the cell executed eight separate grenade attacks - seven of which took place simultaneously on April 14 - as well as a series of shootouts and assassinations. Notably, the cell's operatives assassinated two policemen on May 11, and murdered Mohammad Riyaz, a Sopore resident whom the Lashkar had earlier attempted to kill for the crime of gambling.

Each of these were militarily low-grade attacks - directed at tourists, bystanders, or supposed religious offenders making effective use of limited resources to broadcast the Lashkar's power to its civil society audience. Indeed, the Lashkar has been increasingly using grenades, rather than the more personnel-intensive tactic of suicide-squad attacks. Significantly, a Lashkar arms shipment interdicted by troops along the Line of Control (LoC) on June 20 included a staggering 338 hand grenades, which probably were meant for urban use.

While large attacks do take place still, terror groups such as the Lashkar appear to be conserving their resources in well-established bases such as the Bandipora mountains of north Kashmir. Ever since 1999-2000, the Lashkar started developing fortified hideouts in the Patwan and Chatarnar forests, which served as receiving stations for terrorists who crossed the LoC. Protected by an elaborate system of lookouts, Lashkar operatives proceeded to establish weapon caches and communications centres.

Most important of all, the Bandipora base served as a centre from which operatives and explosives could be despatched for high-profile operations, such as the 2004 attack on the Prime Minister, the New Delhi serial bombings last Diwali, the assassination of State Minister Ghulam Nabi Lone - and, of course, the operation targeting the Chief Minister. While local Lashkar cadre facilitated the operation of the Bandipora-based strike squads, they did not involve themselves directly in executing the attack.

As such, the Lashkar has been able to conserve key cadre for major operations, expending only low-grade operatives for its low-grade urban terror campaign. Bilal Ahmad Mir, charged with having carried out a June 11 grenade attack in Jammu, was a school dropout who agreed to work for money. Shabbir Ahmad Mir, another Srinagar cell member alleged to have bombed a bus carrying tourists in Srinagar, also told interrogators that he agreed to join the Lashkar in return for hard cash.

Clearly, the arrest of such operatives does little to dent the Lashkar's operational abilities. Sources told Frontline that, at a June 20 briefing organised for United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the Northern Army Commander, Lieutenant-General Deepak Kapoor, argued that the core problem was the lack of will among the 31,000 men of the Jammu and Kashmir Police and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) who have been committed to the State capital.

At a subsequent meeting with National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan though, police and intelligence personnel hit back. Officials argued that it was impossible to secure Srinagar unless the Lashkar's mountain bases were destroyed. Local operatives working for the Lashkar had repeatedly been arrested since 2002, Narayanan was told, but their commanders in Bandipora continued to operate with relative impunity because of the Army's unwillingness to flush terrorists out of the forests.

Targeting the Lashkar's north Kashmir fortress - or similar strongholds such as the Yaripora-Shopian mountain in southern Kashmir and the Harwan forests in central Kashmir - is not, however, a simple project. Since at least 2000-01, military strategists have considered the prospect of a pincer action against the Bandipora forests, involving simultaneously pushing troops south from the Bod Kol river near Gurez and north through Patwan and Chatarnar.

However, such action has been deterred by the twin prospects that the estimated 50-75 Pakistani terrorists hidden in the Bandipora forests might evade a large military operation - or, in the alternate, that an offensive push against well-defended positions could result in casualties not commensurate with the potential dividends. An offensive of this scale and the task of ensuring that the forests remain free of terrorists could require an additional Army division, a politically contentious move in the midst of a peace process.

Just what solutions will be found are impossible to predict but solutions are needed if the peace process in the State is not to remain mired in an impasse. Continued killings have worked to undermine the legitimacy of the peace process among audiences in and outside of Jammu and Kashmir. Meanwhile, renewed summer infiltration across the LoC have put paid to hopes that cross-border terrorism would gradually wither away. What some mistook as the end of the storm, it seems likely, was just a lull.

Islamists are also attempting to hammer in the keystone of their project in Jammu and Kashmir: the destruction of indigenous religious identities that challenge their vision of the future. Late in June, the Lashkar-e-Taiba attempted to assassinate the venerated mystic Ahad Ba'b Sopore, one of the best-known custodians of the State's Sufi traditions. While Ahad Ba'b survived the attack unhurt, two members of his congregation were killed and nine injured in the attack.

Eyewitnesses have identified the terrorist who executed the grenade attack as Qayoom Nassar, a well-known Lashkar operative hailing from Sopore's Batpora area. Nassar joined the Lashkar five years ago, when he was just 16 years old, after having dropped out of school after Standard VIII. Interestingly, Nassar's recent actions include the murder of two Sopore residents in May for having engaged in gambling, an activity the Lashkar and other terror groups have repeatedly condemned as anti-Islamic.

Islamists in Sopore and other parts of northern Kashmir have long opposed the influence of Ahad Ba'b, who left his job as policeman and became a mystic after undergoing what he describes as a spiritual experience three decades ago. He then renounced key trappings of the material world, notably clothing. Over time, Ahad Ba'b came to wield enormous religious and temporal power in Kashmir, drawing support from peasants and political leaders - something that incensed the clerical establishment.

As early as 1991, the Hizbul Mujahideen carried out a near-successful assassination attempt on the mystic. However, he escaped unhurt on that occasion as well. In Sopore mythology, the Hizbul Mujahideen was forced to beg forgiveness of the mystic, since as many of its cadre began to die as the grain he fed birds each morning. Ahad Ba'b is also credited by his followers with performing several other miracles in which Islamists who sought to discredit him came off second-best.

At the core of the conflict are ideological disputes between folk religion and Islamist groups that believe that practices such as the veneration of holy relics, or belief in intercession between humans and God through mystics are heretical. Both the Jamaat-e-Islami, from which the Hizbul Mujahideen emerged, and the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadith, the Lashkar's patron, have long believed, as the scholar Mohammad Ishaq Khan has noted, that "Kashmiri Muslims need to be converted afresh".

After 1989, this ideological battle turned violent. Terrorist groups began targeting Sufi shrines, which they assert are antithetical to Islam. As early as June 1994, for example, Lashkar terrorists stormed the historic Baba Reshi shrine at Tangmarg, and fired on pilgrims. Perhaps the most prominent incident in the Islamist campaign was the siege at Chrar-e-Sharif in May 1996, which led to the destruction of the town's famous 700-year-old shrine.

Unnoticed, such attacks continued over the years: a grenade attack in June 2001, for example, killed four women at Chrar-e-Sharif. Earlier, in 2000, Lashkar terrorists destroyed the sacramental tapestries Bafliaz residents had offered at the shrine of Sayyed Noor. Lashkar cadre were also responsible for a May 2005 arson attack that led to the destruction of the shrine of the saint Zainuddin Wali at Ashmuqam. In June 2005, Lashkar operative Bilal Magray threw a grenade at a congregation in Bijbehara, injuring 15 people.

Barring Hizbul Mujahideen prisoners at Jammu's Kot Bhalwal jail, who attacked their Lashkar counterparts after the attack on Ahad Ba'b, political forces in the State confined their response to the bombing to verbal condemnation: there was not one organised street protest, a sign of the willingness of secular formations to cede ground, as well as authorship of its political future, to Islamist organisations and their terrorist armies in Jammu and Kashmir.

On June 16, a seven-member Lashkar squad targeted the village of Nehoch-Dunga, in the Gulabgarh area of the district of Udhampur, to punish villagers it believed had helped security forces eliminate terrorists in the area. The terrorists beheaded 65-year-old Abdul Ahad in the presence of the entire village, and then cut off the noses and ears of Roshan Din and Ghulam Rasool. Six other villagers, including Abdul Ahad's elderly wife Fatima Bi, received a brutal beating.

National politicians, who had competed to express their outrage after the killings of 13 Hindus in the same area in April, remained silent on the hideous violence in Nehoch-Dunga, as did civil rights groups and secessionist politicians such as Mirwaiz Umar Farooq. The Chief Minister, who, like all politicians of State-level significance, chose not to attend the last rites of the nine Nepali labourers killed by terrorists at Kulgam in June, displayed a similar unwillingness to travel to Nehoch-Dunga.

Silence on the prostitution scandal too has helped the Islamist campaign proceed unchecked. Precipitated by charges that a teenage girl had been coerced into prostitution, the case has since expanded to include clients of adult sex-workers employed by a Srinagar brothel-owner. Those arrested in the course of the ongoing investigation include former Ministers G.A. Mir and Raman Mattoo, Border Security Force officer K.C. Padhi, former Additional Advocate-General Anil Sethi and top bureaucrat Iqbal Khanday.

While all of this ought to be evidence that the democratic system does deliver - the investigation, after all, has been carried out by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), and is supervised by the Jammu and Kashmir High Court - the failure of mainstream parties to mobilise in support of the victim has allowed Islamist groups to market themselves as the sole spokespersons of an ethical political order. Notably, no organisation has intervened to seek psychiatric help and legal counselling for the victim herself.

Astoundingly, the Kashmir Bar Association, whose Islamist-affiliated leader Abdul Qayoom has spearheaded judicial intervention in the scandal, even passing a resolution prohibiting its members from defending those arrested on scandal-linked charges. One lawyer who defied the ban, Maulvi Aijaz, was assaulted by cadre of the Islamist women's group, the Dukhtaran-e-Millat, while Jammu-based counsel for the accused were threatened with assassination, sparking off a strike in the State's winter capital.

If something is to be salvaged from the five-year-old dialogue process in Jammu and Kashmir, democratic forces need to find a voice - and soon. As things stand, the constitutional consultative processes that emerged from the round table conference last month already seem faintly absurd, severed by political apathy from the violence and pain of peoples' lives in Jammu and Kashmir. No process, after all, can deliver peace unless its participants commit themselves to political action.